It’s the end of a very interesting week. On Monday we kicked off the week with an interview with Cameron Olthuis. Cameron gave some really insightful answers. I asked Cameron what has been the biggest surprise to him about the growth of social media. His answer was:
The biggest surprise to me is that many big brands and industries have failed to recognize this trend and leverage it. Take the surfing industry for example: many of the big lifestyle brands in that industry have large followings and crazy brand evangelists that would be perfect for social media marketing, yet none of them have recognized this trend or leveraged it properly. That whole industry needs a kick in the ass when it comes to online marketing.
Our interview series has provided some great insight and ideas about how to successfully use social media marketing from many of the leaders in social media. If you have not read all the interviews I recommend checking out all our interviews here. In the next two weeks we have interviews lined up with social media expert Neil Patel and link bait expert Andy Hagan.
On Tuesday we wrote about how PETCO is Creating A Marketing Buzz Via Video. Why did Petco decide to build a marketing campaign around user-generated content? John Lazarchic, Petco vice president of e-commerce says that:
“At the end of the day we always want sales. And with the video reviews, if they are done well, I think we will see an uptick on the products that have that type of review,” “With the written reviews, we’ve been able to tie it back to ROI. But I think the return with video will be more on engagement with the web site, site stickiness, and people’s tendency to come back to Petco as a source of information than necessarily a direct purchase as a result of this technology.”
Later in the week we wrote about Measuring Social Media Campaigns. How to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is a topic that has spawned thousands of blog posts, many of which throw up a mathematical formula that would give Einstein pause to think. Some of the best thoughts came in the comments to the post.
Katie of KDPaine’s PR Measurement Blog (http://kdpaine.blogs.com/) wrote in response to the article:
The reason why Social Media Measurement has spawned such discussion is that “R” in ROI changes from campaign to campaign. Not everyone dives into Social Media to generate conversion. Many are there to listen to customers and improve products and better understand the marketplace. Others are there to change minds, educate the marketplace or simply inform. That’s why we are all gravitating to engagement and influence because we’re not all agreeing on what return to expect.
